About -Veribatim

My passion is writing (blogging, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, novels). I own a web design company and actively engaged in the political scene. My reading tastes are incredibly eclectic: distopian fiction, science, science fiction, politics, history, classics, fantasy and humor, just to name a few.

colleagues at the Karolinska Institute published a paper in 2005 describing experiments comparing white matter tracts in brain scans of professional pianists with the brains of people of the same age who never learned to play the instrument. They succeeded where others had failed in visualizing learning simply by looking in the right but most unlikely place: the areas of the brain devoid of neurons. The brain images from professional pianists showed that they had more thickly myelinated axons in one white matter tract (the posterior limb of the internal capsule) on the right side of the brain....

This last region of the brain to myelinate is the area of our cerebral cortex critical for judgment and complex reasoning. This is the same area of the brain disconnected by surgeons in prefrontal lobotomy. Lobotomy renders patients unable to make complex decisions, to plan or show forethought. If the transmission lines to these regions of the brain are not fully formed, adolescents do not have the full circuitry that enables the adult brain to make rational decisions in complex situations. Interestingly, the age at which most societies bestow full legal responsibility on an individual is not...

Note:Myelination of the brain with age and what it has to do with adolescents tried as adults in court.

The brain imaging technique revealing IQ is a special application of magnetic resonance imaging. Regular MRI scans are used by doctors to reveal the interior details of the brain in thin optical sections for diagnosis; the special type of brain scan, called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), reveals the finest structure of axon cables in white matter, enabling scientists to untangle the bundles of axons in their jumbled pathways tunneling through living brain tissue. This X-ray vision is accomplished by computer-assisted imaging that is sensitive to how easily water molecules in the brain seep in...

Neurophysiologists who worked on hippocampal LTP in the 1980s and 1990s were the elite among memory researchers, for they had reduced memory to its elemental form: the strengthening of a synaptic connection between neurons. With their fine glass electrodes they had pinned down the elusive mystery of memory in a dish, and they succeeded in isolating it in a single synaptic connection from the vast complexity of the brain.

long-term potentiation, or LTP, is now understood to be the cellular basis for learning and memory. Memories are connections between neurons, and these strengthened connections could now be seen by electrophysiologists in a slice of rat brain. Vigorous research over the last thirty years around the world has determined in fine detail the mechanisms for LTP down to the molecular level. If we can understand the molecules that store memories, we should be able to make drugs to improve memory or help those with weakened memory due to age, disease, or defects of birth.

The best-studied example of this is the process of vision. In examining development of three-dimensional vision in kittens opening their eyes to the world, the Nobel Prize winners David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel found that visual interaction with the environment was absolutely essential in wiring the visual cortex, the part of the cerebral cortex where vision is analyzed. If they placed a patch over one eye of a newborn kitten and a few weeks later removed it, the cat would be forever blind in that eye. There was nothing wrong with the optics of that eye, but the brain could make no use of the...

The two brains communicate with each other through a massive trunk of nerve fibers (the corpus callosum), which carries information between sister portions of the cerebral cortex on either side of the brain. Patients who have had these lines of communication severed to control seizures appear perfectly normal in every way, but clever tests reveal that the two brains occupying one head are completely unaware of each other after losing these connections. This can be shown by tests presenting information to only one side of a patient’s brain, for example by blocking one eye when showing the patient...

Note:The fascinating connection between our right and left brain, as well as the corpus callosum.

Research published in 2005 by Jeffrey Coull and colleagues at Laval University in Quebec, Canada, has identified one way that microglia cause hyperexcitability in spinal cord pain neurons after their P2X4 receptors are activated by ATP. When the researchers inserted microelectrodes into the spinal cord neurons so they could measure the electrical signals, and then applied ATP to stimulate the P2X4 receptors on microglia, the voltage in the neurons dropped suddenly. Somehow the microglia were reducing the voltage in neurons, thus triggering pain neurons to fire impulses excitedly, which the brain...

Sativex, a drug acting on cannabinoid receptors, has been used in Canada and other countries since 2005 for treatment of chronic pain in multiple sclerosis patients. The drug is currently in phase III clinical trials for use in the United States.

Note:Drug derived from marijuana undergoing testing in the US for pain in MS patients.